Week In Review

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Week In Review: Week 24

The halfway point of our term snuck past us this week. We had absolutely no idea that's where we were until I sat down on Saturday to look over the calendar, update attendance & all that jazz.

Wow, the term has flown by, hasn't it! We were worried about having to make up some time/work with that week of allergy induced sickness the kids had, but thus far they've worked really hard to make-up for that time.

Autumn has officially rolled in, all though a few days this week Winter was knocking on the doors. I'm not quite ready for the cloudy days of winter, but I do so enjoy the crisper autumn ones!

Morgan & I wrapped up Bonanza Girl on Thursday. We hit those last 2 chapters & couldn't put it down. Funny to the end, all though there were some doubts about the ending. There's a lovely author's note at the end of the book that you really mustn't miss if you read the story. Our copy is now mangled because Archimedes decided to go "read" the author's note himself. *sigh*

We did not finish Evidence For Jesus but we did read several more chapters. It's interesting to look at this book from the perspective of a believer & a non-believer that's for sure.

We dug back into our Fix-It Grammar this week. I'm not sure what on earth took us so long to dig it out this term. I think learning the ropes of a new curriculum played a small part in that, but it's all good! We really love our Fix-It, quick, simple, & to the point.

We also finished off our beloved read aloud: The Railway Children. We got to the final 2 chapters of this one & lost ourselves for a while as we finished it off. There was a collective sigh in the room when it ended & then some bemoaning that the author had not shared the excitement over all that had likely unfolded. There's a lovely biography of the author at the end of our copy which was an interesting read too. Now to find a new read aloud, one child requested, "..something less old-fashioned!" And when I said, "What a shame, I was considering Robin Hood next." He changed his mind a bit when he heard that, but in fairness we still haven't selected a new read aloud!

It was chilly enough that this funny roo joined us for math lessons one day. He said he was very very cold, but then proceeded to eat a Bio-Stick {frozen juice pop} which made the rest of us chuckle a bit. Said Roo is making lovely progress in math, & flew through this weeks lesson. I do love how Mr Demme offers a hard lesson, often followed by a slightly easier one at times.

Morgan tackled his own math in the sunny kitchen under the Dakin. Smart boy on such a chilly day {don't be fooled by the beautiful light in the photo!} No, he's not googling math answers, he uses a calculator for some of his math work these days. It took us forever to convince him it was not cheating to use a calculator!

Our sweet boy wrote out Phillipians 1:1 this week & when I looked at his paper I was a little distressed by what I saw. I pulled out his grey overlay {generally only used while waiting on his tints to come in} & put it over the paper. He'd had no idea how poorly his handwriting had been until that moment. So, I printed a bunch of my homemade HWOT Style papers & cut them to fit in his little notebook. We need to make an office supply shop run to get heavier duty paper to fill his book with & remove all the white papers. I'll have to share a handwriting comparison in another post. Either way he was writing a quote from his devotional in the above photo, but also copied out Phillipians 1:1-2 during the week.

Morgan tackled more of Module 11 in his Physical Science book. Archimedes flew over to "help" after getting told off for trying to drink my smoothie. Seriously, that bird is a character & a half. Morgan was actually listening to a lecture & taking notes, which greatly irritated Archimedes who tried to steal his pencil. As for the child doing school, his science notes have come such a long way, they were awesome to look over. He'll wrap up that module in the new week.

We are enjoying our final poet of the year in our poetry book: Walt Whitman. The artwork on all the pages with his poems are really beautiful. We had a lovely chat about how, as a poet, his work didn't sell as well as he'd hoped which brought up the topic that many poets & authors we consider amazing today were not considered amazing in their time. Some of them were considered to be quite the cracked-pots actually.

Jayde enjoyed more picture study with his lovely book. The picture this week wasn't one we both enjoyed as it portrayed Jesus in a bit of cloth that was falling off & a bit.. revealing. It was however interesting to try & decide which disciple was which. We read another Emily Dickinson poem this week as well, one of my favourites, the "Nobody" poem. Jayde was quick to guess the meaning behind the poem as we read a bit of a biography about Emily earlier this year in which we learned of her extreme shyness & how people often tried to get a peek at her because she was considered to be such an oddity.

He also tackled the rest of his art project from last week. The idea was to make a piece that looks like stained glass. Apparently Jayde doesn't remember the beautiful stained glass we saw in Stanley last year. On our historical tour one of the stops was a local church. You could only get in with a key & the location to obtain said key was closed for the day, but we were still able to check out the beautiful historical stained glass features from the exterior. He decided to google a window similar to what he was suppose to be making for ideas on how to lay out his "glass" lines. His end piece is beautiful & while driving around on errand day he spotted a lovely stained glass window & then noticed the Nana's neighbour had hung something in her window to make it look like a stained glass window as well.

We started several new books in HOD this week & they were each lovely in their own way. Jayde loved this one, which is no surprise as it was a non-fiction. However, I think he loved the snippets of facts he was learning about a particular person this week & I suspect this reminded him very much of Our Island Story which he absolutely loved, in fact he loved it so much he leant it to Nana & told her she really needed to read it so she could brush up on her British History. She delighted in the idea as, "it's been many years since I was a school child."

This is another HOD selection & wow, aren't the illustrations in this book amazing! We read about the same Goth in this book as we did in the previous. He was also to base his longer historical narration on the reading in this book. I found it really interesting which portions of the reading he could easily remember vs which ones he needed a little help with.

We started A Midsummer Nights Dream in Shakespeare this week. It will be interesting to see if he struggles to keep the characters straight in this one as there's many loops to this particular story, aren't there? He's far far to young to remember, but many years ago when we were state side we saw this very play done for free in a local park. It was a lovely event put on at a very low cost, but what fun we had!

He's still working through Jed Smith, but we pulled out our DITHOR lessons to tackle this week. I wanted to give him a good head start on the story so he could pull from it to apply the character based lessons, & it worked as he found some of the lessons much easier this week. He struggled with the one about discussing times you've shown specific character traits. He seems to feel he lacks them, so I took the paper away & filled it in, loudly, pointing out each time during the week when he showed the character traits we were discussing.

Jayden & I began a new read aloud together this week as well. This is a new story to us, so there was much curiosity as we sat down to read. I was delighted to get to use an Irish accent which I can do far easier than the British accent. One of the main characters is a Viking, so there were absolutely no complaints about this title.

This weeks art project was suppose to be tea dying a bit of paper & then writing first in Greek & then English a verse from the book of John. Due to the previous art project still being in progress we cheated & simply wrote the verse where we were suppose to glue our "parchment". I thought we had some parchment around from a previous craft, but we didn't & our boy was just as delighted to do it this way. He was very smitten by the idea of writing in Greek & decided he'd like to learn Greek. So much so he got himself all set up with DuoLingo & has been working daily on it.

His lovely notebooking pages for the week. His postcard was address to Mr X this week. I would not put it past this child to use every letter in the alphabet at some point, he's a hoot. He was also delighted with this weeks research topic, Constantinople, because he knew many of the answers to questions he was suppose to research & was delighted to look them up & see if he was right.

I loved this detailed drawing in one of his timeline boxes this week. He spent a long tie on making those boats "just right" & then was stressed about drawing the people so I suggested he go with stick figures.

Morgan tackled his French this week as well as his own history programme. We didn't see much of him during those times, but I looked up one day to find him plunked at the desk across from us. I had to do a double take because he was sitting much like my father use to sit. He also tackled a few art projects of his own this week, one of which had me banned from the craft area because it was a Mother's Day card.

Morgan also had hockey this week. I couldn't get a photo of him without other children & coaches so no actual photo to post. He had a lovely time scoring 3 of the 4 goals in his first game {more of a scrimmage as they warmed up & worked on skills} & then was put in as a goalie in the next game where he made such a lovely tackle in the opening minutes that his coach's delight & joy was pretty fun to watch. The young men coaching this week are older teens from the state team, & their enthusiasm is lovely to see as is their attitudes in teaching those younger players.

Jayde took his Civil War quilt to keep warm with {yes it was in many photos this week as I was using it while my book quilt was in the wash} & was given special permission to take an ipad to play on. Normally that's a no-no, but he was dealing with some anxiety issues & I suspected being distracted by conquering some land in Rome might mean we could both enjoy the hockey match in our own ways.

We normally take a daily afternoon walk, but we've been slack lately as we've been really struggling to find a groove. This week we seemed to have really hit our pace which was lovely & we headed to the local footy field near our home for a jaunt. A bit later than we normally go out so others were walking their dogs which mean our Buster didn't enjoy himself as much as he might have otherwise. We keep him in a lead around other dogs as he's a bit of a grump in his old age towards some dogs. All up though it was a beautiful day for a walk & were a little sad that we didn't get more in.

No social engagements, aside from hockey this week, as the local group was meeting a little too far up the coast for us. It was raining heavily down our way & I just wasn't up for the drive on top of battling a migraine. Instead we stayed home & we each worked on various things.

1 comment:

Hi Kendra, just popping in to say that I've missed seeing your updates and have been praying you're all doing well. I love reading your posts, as they are such an encouragement to me even if it's just wrap-ups of your school week. Blessings! ;)